Embodiments of the invention relate to the field of partitioning, and according to one embodiment, a method and apparatus, and system for shared cache usage to different partitions in a socket with sub-socket partitioning.
As modern microprocessors become increasingly faster with growing number of cores, it becomes feasible from a performance viewpoint to run multiple operating systems on the same hardware. This ability opens up many possibilities including Server consolidation and ability to run services Operating Systems in parallel to the main Operating System. Providing this ability can be done either in software or in hardware. In software it is done using virtualization mechanisms by running a Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) underneath the Operating Systems. The present partitioning software schemes partition only down to a socket granularity. Unfortunately, partitioning for a socket that contains and integrated device or system with multiple processor cores is limited at the socket level and precludes partitioning down to a particular core within the processor or socket.